Tunnels 02, Deeper

someone else was crying out. She came close to losing consciousness again, the curtains parting a little to allow her through.
    The Limiters forced her to walk, suspended between them. The pain was unbearable. She felt her hip grinding, fractured bone upon fractured bone, and nearly blacked out. Sweat trickled down her forehead and into her eyes, making her blink, making her close her eyes.
    She was dying and she knew it.
    But she wasn't going to die yet.
    As long as she was breathing there was still a chance she could help Will and Cal.

    * * * * *

    Drake slipped through the tunnel as fleetly as the winds that swept around him. He paused every so often to search the path for any sign that it had been used recently. The constant gale ensured the sand and grit didn't lie undisturbed for long, so he knew he was unlikely to be confused by any old tracks along the way.
    Without stopping, he touched the tip of his shoulder, which had been clipped by a bullet. It was only a flesh wound -- he'd had worse. He dropped his hand to the knife at his hip, and then to the pad of stove guns on his thigh. He felt distinctly vulnerable without his rifle and rucksack full of munitions, which he'd lost back at the entrance to the Bunker. And his hearing was slightly impaired from the blast of the stove mortar, an unremitting whistling present in his ears.
    Still, all that was a small price to pay for getting out with his life. It had been a close call -- the closest yet -- and it didn't make sense to him. The Limiters had him cold, and yet they'd held back. It was as if they wanted him alive -- but that wasn't their modus operandi at all. After the mortar had caused mayhem among the droves of approaching Styx, he had taken advantage of the chaos and the whirling dust to duck back into the Bunker.
    From then on it was child's play. He could navigate the complex with his eyes shut, although Elliott's explosions had blocked several of the fastest routes through. And there were numerous patrols of Limiters, many with stalkers, to contend with. For a while he laid low in a dugout he'd prepared for this very eventuality. He was fortunate that the dogs were hampered by the aftermath of Elliott's handiwork; the fumes and dust still carried in the air made it impossible for them to pick up his scent trail.
    He used a drainage duct to exit the Bunker, but even when he was back on the Great Plain he found he wasn't out of the woods yet. To shake off the mounted troop of Styx and the packs of stalkers snapping at his heels, he'd had to lay some false tracks. He'd used every trick in the book to finally elude them.
    Now, as the sound of the wind joined with the whistling in his ears, he squatted down to study the ground. He was concerned that he hadn't found anything yet. Elliott could be taking one of several routes, but this was the most likely.
    He got up and continued for another hundred feet until he came across what he'd been looking for.
    "Here we are," he announced, evaluating the impressions in the dust. They were fresh footprints, and it was easy enough for him to tell to whom they belonged.
    "Chester, and... and this must be Will! So he made it!" he said, with a shake of his head and a tight smile, relieved. He reached his hand over to the left, tracing around another print, and then lowered himself down onto his chest to assess the profile in more detail.
    "Cal -- your leg's acting up, isn't it?" he muttered, seeing the unevenness of one of the boy's footprints.
    Another set of tracks caught his eye in the dust next to Cal's.
    "Stalker?" he posed aloud, wondering if there was any evidence of a struggle, and maybe even traces of blood, in the area. He crawled closer to scrutinize the prints.
    "No, this is no dog, this is feline. This must be a Hunter."
    Mulling over what this could mean, he stood up and searched a wider area. "Elliott, where are you?" he was saying to himself as he attempted to locate her prints, knowing it would be more difficult due to the manner in which she moved.
    A quick search yielded nothing, and he decided he couldn't afford to spend any longer checking. Every second meant that Elliott and the boys would be that much farther away. He set off again along the tunnel.
    Several hundred feet farther on, he squatted down to inspect the ground again, then cried out.
    "Ow! Dang it!"
    He felt the Parchers burn his hand and saw the faint glow they were beginning to emit. He immediately wiped his hand on his pants to